Emotion Concepts and Self-Focused Attention: Exploring Parallel Effects of Emotional States and Emotional Knowledge

Abstract

Many experiments have found that emotional experience affects self-focused attention. Several approaches to cognition and emotion predict that conscious emotional experience may be unnecessary for this effect. To test this hypothesis, two experiments primed emotion concepts without affecting emotional experience. In Experiment 1, subliminal exposure to sad faces (relative to happy faces and neutral faces) increased self-focused attention but not subjectively experienced affect. In Experiment 2, a scrambled-sentences task that primed happy and sad emotion concepts increased self-focused attention relative to a neutral task. Thus, simply activating knowledge about emotions was sufficient to increase self-focused attention. The discussion considers implications for research on how emotional states affect self-awareness.